When you go to the gym and look around a little, then you will notice that those people who want to lose fat are on some type of cardio machine, and those people who want to build muscle are lifting weights. The majority of people, who want to get rid of fat, always use cardio exercises to achieve their goal. But is it really necessary to spend hours and hours every week doing boring cardio workouts? Or is there a better way to lose fat?

Using long cardio workouts to burn fat?

The number of people who actually are able to lose a lot of fat and keep it off, are very small indeed. People very often get some “advice” from a fat loss “guru” and then put it into practice without even thinking about it. Even when they do not get the results that they want, they still do the same thing over and over again. But if something does not work like you want to, then take time off and find out what is the problem. Most of the time the problem is that people are using the wrong exercises to burn fat.

Although cardio workouts to burn fat are important, but you also have to do them right, or else you will do more harm than good for yourself. The danger of doing very long cardio workouts, is that you lose muscle mass along with fat. The less muscle you have, the slower your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is, and the less calories you burn.

Another reason why cardio workouts are not that effective as people think, is because your body as it gets into better shape, gets more efficient at burning calories. So it takes a lot less calories or energy to do the exercise. So you have to constantly make your workouts longer to burn the same amount of calories, as you did before, and this means muscle loss. Long and boring cardio workouts also have no effect on your BMR, but building muscle with weight training does. Weight training really is even more important, when it comes to fat loss, than long cardio workouts actually.